If you are into SEO (search engine optimization), you probably know who Matt Cutts is. Matt Cutts is a top software engineer at Google, and has a well followed blog. Recently he commented that google may start taking into account site load time in its rankings.
While likely not a factor in the rankings until 2010, and the impact maybe small, it’s something to start thinking about. After all if your site is slow, page rank might be the least of your problems. Owing to the notorious fickleness of users, if you don’t grab their attention in 2 or 3 seconds, they are on to the next thing.
Google webmaster tools has a new feature for you to quickly assess your site’s performance. Under the labs section you will find a “site performance” link that will tell you the average page load time and how you rank against all the other web sites on the internet. If you are slower than 85% of the other web sites on the web, you have some work to do.
I am always amazed at the number of small businesses centers that do not know about Google Local Business Center. The word is getting out there but slowly.
If you search on a keyword phrase that includes a geographic term, especially a city name, you will likely get a list of several results (often 10) that click into a map results. These are local businesses that have a physical presence and relevance for the term you typed in.
The idea was to give local brick and mortar businesses visibility in the SERPS. Usually these businesses have no or an inadequate web presence and can certainly use the help.
Registering with Google Local Business Center is free. You can add pictures and video to your entry. Make sure you have your physical address on your web site and participate in the verification that google will do when you add a listing into the LBC. Check out the below video for more:
Everyone wants their site to be found by google, right? Who wouldn’t want more free traffic delivered to their site? The goal of getting onto page 1 of the SERPs (search engine result pages) is such a holy grail, that a whole service industry called search engine optimization has come into it’s own.
But traffic doesn’t always come from the search engines. And some online businesses are not at all interested in marketing to just anyone, but rather just to a targeted clientele that comes to them virally rather via search.
Meet invitation only sites such as Rue La La a luxury e-tailer that seeks to promote an air of exclusivity. To become a member, you have to be invited, and only then can you have access to its discounted designer goods.
Putting your site behind an authentication prompt, which Rue La La has done, is one way to hide your pages from the search engines. Another is through directives in a file, robots.txt, you place on your site. Sites such as Gilt Groupe, another invite only site have excluded many of their site’s directories from the spiders.
So if you are searching for a killer deal on that Gucci bag online, be aware there are certain sites that are completely hidden from you unless you are “in the know”.
Alexa and Google PR ranks are a quick measure how strong a site is in traffic and from the search engine perspective. They measure very different things but are both important.
An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alex rank the better. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. And if you are in the top 100,000, congratulations! If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.
A google PR (page rank) is a little harder to explain as very few people know exactly it is calculated, but it is a measure of how popular and how much of an authority it is. Google PRs range from 1-10, with 10 being the most coveted.
There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.
Unless you can put a tick by most of the elements in our list then your web site is NOT very search engine friendly.
If a search engine is to regard your web site as truly search engine friendly it must be able to tick a lot more of the items in our list than was ever previously the case.
If you can not in all honesty tick enough elements on the list below, then you have some catching up to do, especially when this is not a complete list.
Details on how often to visit
htaccess file used
Related terms on a page relevant to topic
No tracking hosted by other sites
Unique page titles that use keyword phrases
Minimal on-page scripts and inline CSS
No rapid building of site links
Information on the type of page
No pages with similar content
Key pages that are reached in two clicks
Incoming links use keyword phrases
Permanent redirect links to other pages
Link nofollow tag used
Incoming links from topic related sites
Less than 155 character page description
You might also like to try our optimization tutorial quiz to see how search engine friendly your website is compared to our full list of fifty factors.
There are ten questions in our online search engine optimization tutorial quiz that cover all the essential aspects for a search engine friendly website and cover the essential elements of optimization that you should have on your own web site.
An optimization tutorial following the quiz explains why all of the elements are important in making your site well optimized and search engine friendly.
You will not be asked to sign-up for anything, or provide any personal details.
About the Author:
Andy Theekson has 8 years of experience in web site design and search engine optimization and offers free advice and a wide range of website optimization services.
The online community is definitely a large market place that you cannot ignore, especially if you have an internet business. There are thousands if not millions of consumers that you can tap in the internet.
At the same time, the internet also poses a quite different challenge. The easy access that internet provides also gives you as much competition as you can imagine. It is too crowded and congested.
Having a website is not enough to make your business running and able to compete. You must take other alternatives to give way for the online community to access your website at any rate or chance possible.
You have to expose your website. Make it known. It has to be visible. It has to be frequently targeted by consumers and surfers.
Invest in marketing your internet site. There are basically two options available to you, the SEO and PPC. These two are probably the most desirable alternatives you can get for your internet business as strategy for search engine marketing.
1. SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Some researches indicate that 60% – 70% of internet surfers and users actually resort to using the Google search engine to find and locate web sites and pages, for any topic they desire. SEO is the process taken to make sure that the internet uses will find your website when ranked among the top results of a search. This way you can make sure that you will be visible and can clearly stand out from the rest.
To get a search engine optimization, you will have to build on your own internet site frequently hit internet links to web site pages. The process will involve IBLN or Independent Back-Linking Network, wherein hundreds or even thousands of pages will be utilized to promote a particular website of a client.
In SEO, there is no need for you to pay for the clicks although it will require you to spend time doing research to get a favorable combination of ads and target audience. The SEO process is a long term one. It requires months, 6 months at the least, before the proper outcome is fully achieved, but once the goal is accomplished, you will definitely get a steady source of profit.
2. PPC
PPC means Pay Per Click. It gives way advertising on a search engine. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads. There will first be a bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine.
With this kind of advertising, you can still basically control your campaign as you get to create your own ad. You will also manage the target audience and still stay within the bounds of your budget. Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also very well check if your ad gets to be shown at all and if it is competitive with the rest.
There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy.
? PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.
? At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive. Could it possibly happen that someone out there will go on clicking on your ad? This will definitely give you a large bill without the expected profit on your part. If this provides a lot of worries, be rest assured that there is a protection for you. Networks are able to recognize fraudulent clicks.
? You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by the target number of clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next period you want it again displayed.
? You will also be able to adjust well to changes in market demands and trends.
In deciding which of the two strategies will work right for you, think of your goals and of your resources. They definitely offer benefits and advantages that will work for your good. The better way to approach this two is to evaluate according to your short term and long term plans. Take the PPC course for your short term goals and choose SEO if you have long term ones.
There world is out there for you now. Just make sure you do what will work best for your entrepreneurial endeavors and visions. The secret to success lies in your hands. Just study your options well and you’ll get exactly what you want.
SEO services have transformed a lot since they started, and with today’s market, a SEO Consultant is becoming more meaningful than ever. The web is a amazing market and there are very distinct ways to get traffic to your pages. SEO has been a amazing way to build your site as well as off page optimization to generate search engine traffic to your site, and many tactics have been invented to do that efficiently as well as inexpensively.
In the new era of the information age there are so many local businesses now online] that tailoring organic SEO services to those markets specifically has become vitally important in competing with other local businesses for the same specific and focused markets.
Although organic SEO is not only designed for local competition and traffic management, tactics that are allowing local businesses that have both an online and offline presence to compete effectively in their respective markets without having to use broadened SEO approach such as targeting traffic of a certain market across local and long distance markets. Occasionally you just want to focus your search engine traffic funneling efforts to, for example, people specific to Sacramento California, and to do that you can use specific keywords used by Sacramentans along with other techniques in your SEO.
There are some complex maneuvers used in local and other focused areas of SEO qualified traffic generation that organic SEO services use to give a site the advantage in their needed market and niche that include actively watching over the competitions site activities, search engine inquiries (i.e. keywords used to arrive at their sites), and so on to gather statistics and data to use in tuning up their clients site to meet and exceed their competitions level of success in aquiring the traffic/market share.
The organic SEO services are a relatively new more focused type of SEO service for the modern world of the online marketplace and the needs of the many new types of markets marketers/companies are looking for. In the beginning the net marketers were looking for a more broad area of traffic and didn’t much care about where it came from so long as it was targeted to their niche, but today with just about every business including brick and mortar companies launching sites to supplement their offline presence as well as bringing in more business to their offline presence (such as restaurants wanting more people to find their restaurant using the web and affordable search engine optimization to accomplish this task, obviously with local residents to their restaurant area).
The web is evolving just like anything else and the latest organic SEO services are great for companies of all types, and people seeking a new variety of focused SEO services and needs. Luckily for many new to the web marketing ideas there are amazing companies that handle the hard part for them!
If you are not into spending a lot of your hard earned money on pay-per-click marketing or other various paid advertising and website promotion techniques then you certainly want to have the option of using search engine optimization on your site to increase your search engine ranking.
SEO can be accomplished by the average webmaster if you take a little time to learn about your best options with it.
Whatever your site is about the first thing you need to keep in mind is that your main page and subsequent pages should content fresh, relevant content that others are searching for on the particular subject your website is about.
Just throwing up a splash page for a product really doesn’t qualify for a content website that the search engines are going to love. Nope just the opposite.
A site with 5-6 pages on it won’t get you ranked very high either unless you make considerable effort optimizing it for the search engines and make an effort to add content to it on a regular basis that is relevant to the site.
So what is the best way to proceed.
First off find a good search engine optimization tutorial online. Do a search for “seo tutorials” and you will find hundreds of sites available with a tutorial on them.
If your going to pursue seo then your first and most important step would be to design your page around a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Stay away from main keywords because you would only be competing with the already established sites and will have little chance of ranking very high for them.
Instead, find a keyword phrase highly relevant to your website and optimize the main page around it. Then do the same for all subsequent pages and interlink them back to your main page.
In addition to that be sure to include a couple of paragraphs of relevant content that includes references to the keyword phrases you are optimizing for.
You need to direct your website to the people that are interested in your content and in your product by keeping the content you provide them very relevant and up to date.
Basically what you are trying to do is optimize your pages for both the visitor and the search engines. If your focused on your market you will find it is not as hard as it may sound.
Although SEO is an important aspect of promoting your website it is not the only method to focus on. You should have a diverse arsenal of strategies to use to drive more visitors to your site.
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Video advertisements are not a new form of marketing. It’s been done on TV for several years with success. On the internet it’s a sensation. Videos are responsible for selling billions of dollars per year of products.
The search engines love the video sites and rank videos very highly providing you pick the right keywords. search engine optimization brick nj
Videos should be a part of everyone’s arsenal that wants to rank well in the search engines and hold several positions for your chosen keywords. Video sites hold very high page rank and have thousands (if not more) backlinks. You can literally control a whole page of google with just videos.
It’s never been easier to create a video. You can use a simple webcam or a screen capture program and have your first video made in literally minutes. You don’t need all the fancy editing, unless it’s a full blown commercial.
If you have a funny video or a video of something strange, who knows it might go viral. Viral videos get millions of views and are linked to from thousands of websites. Once your video goes viral you might need to get new hosting to support all of the traffic your site can get.search engine optimization toms river nj
There are many video sites out there and they all rank very high on the search engines.
You have youtube, google video, yahoo video, msn soapbox, myspace video, dailymotion, metacafe, photobucket, and a ton more. As you can see the main internet companies all seem to have video sites. You can take advantage of this traffic by getting your own videos on these sites.
For creating videos there are many programs, the prices range from free to several thousand dollars. A few of the popular programs are CamStudio, Camtasia, Sony Vegas, and Windows Movie Maker.
You can manually put your videos on these sites or you can use a program to automate this. Some programs out there to automate your video submission process are tubemogul, videopostrobot, and heyspread. It’s a very simple process. You just input your keywords and description for the videos and have these programs submit the videos for you. Usually you need to have an account at each video site, so sign up at each one first.
Once your videos are up, check out the comments and see what other people think about your videos. It’s always good to get feedback to see where you can improve. Who knows your next video might be the next Evolution of Dance?
Another technique is going to the video sites and seeing what the popular videos are and creating something similar. This is harder, but if one video got tons of traffic, a copy cat video can also generate a massive amount of traffic.
Get going. Start creating videos today. Your business will be glad you did.
Today, online marketers should never make the mistake of underestimating the power of blogs in support of their internet marketing campaigns. Blogging has become one of the pillars of the industry and is now one of the mediums business marketers are focusing on to promote their services and products.
Blogs is perhaps the modern form of magazines and newspapers. The emergence of special blog search engines such as Technorati.com just goes to show how blogs keep on growing in popularity. Blogs are easy to manage and update. They could be used as a medium to relay useful information related to your business. Blogging as been around for years and are expected to stay around in the long-term.
Try looking and there are blogs created especially for several industries – news, music, videos, pharmaceuticals, food, travel, and so on. They have truly become a popular way to earn money online. Creating a supporting blog for your original website or websites, if you have more than one, is another way to generate backlinks to your site.
If you are managing a blog, you also have the option to build a link neighborhood with other bloggers of the same category. A relevant link neighborhood helps boost your page rank in search engines like Google and Yahoo, which is good for your Internet marketing campaign.
Internet marketers could also use blogs to place their banner and text ads. There are a number of online programs nowadays that offers bloggers a fee for allowing ads on their sites. Pay-per-post campaigns, on the other hand, make use of bloggers’ writing skills to come up with relevant content to promote the advertisers.